Morrow Family Christmas Letter #13: Christmas 2014

Morrows in Greystone Farms, our Birmingham neighborhood

It’s Christmas once again.  In the midst of the ‘hot mess’ (that’s Southern for “mess”) that we call the whole world, this little envelope of yuletide cheer known as the Morrow Family Christmas Letter couldn’t come soon enough. Unfortunately, threats of cyber attacks from “sophisticated actors” in North Korea to leak incriminating and formerly unread drafts of the MFCL recently emerged. The threats forced us to shelve our merriment until tensions calmed. To be quite candid, the early drafts are

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #12: Christmas 2013

The red kettles are out. Your neighbors’ inner Griswald is running amok with reckless disregard for any neighborhood covenants. And where the skies are so blue, the outdoor temperature is dropping faster than the President’s approval rating. It can only mean one thing:  It’s Christmas time… and THAT can only mean one other thing: You are about to be disappointed.  

Contrary to what any sane reader of the Morrow Family Christmas Letter would conclude, we actually

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #11: Christmas 2012

Days – nigh, weeks – have passed since you began your daily anticipatory trudges to the increasingly irrelevant U.S. Postal service box that sits atop your driveway/sidewalk/doorstep. Each day prior to this one, your trek was met with the disappointing consolation prize of somebody else's Christmas letter. Or a card. Even lamentable photo postcards of household pets wearing sweaters – as if purposefully intended to torment you.

But today. Today was different. Finally. In your hands you beheld

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #10: Christmas 2011

Morrows really dig Christmas.

Osama Bin Laden and Kim Jong Il are dead.  Oprah and Regis are out. Fear Factor is in. Wall Street is… occupied. The kids are asking for toys like President Obama asks the Iranian government to give back our downed stealth drone. And the interior of the Morrow home looks like a yuletide episode of Hoarders.  That can only mean one thing: It’s Christmas.  And Christmas means the Morrow Family Christmas letter.

Morrows love Christmas. And you love Morrows. Well… some of you do. Truth be told, somewhere along the line

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #9: Christmas 2010

Cuties. You get one guess at which one is
faking her "sleep" for the Christmas Card... 

These are consequential times. The frivolity of the Morrow Family Christmas Letter (MFCL) from so many years past simply will not do in 2010. We are in the midst of a recession. People are literally fighting to protect their “junk” from enhanced patdowns at airports. Our children likely will never know the joy of a joystick, cassette tapes, typewriters, camcorders large enough to throw your back out, the Soviet Union, or private health insurance.  What’s next, Happy Meal toys? Yet here we sit. Staring at the blank page destined soon to drip with our annual Manifesto of Holiday Cheer. And no one is in the mood to laugh.

Further complicating matters, private conversations between Morrow Family Christmas Letter diplomats recently were

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #8: Christmas 2009

Over the past few years, the Morrow Family Christmas Letter (MFCL) has endured its share of ups and downs. A writer’s strike and housing market crash threatened to shelve of our annual ‘envelope of happy.’ Last year the MFCL was deemed “too big to fail,” and a last minute bailout with a bridge loan to nowhere and a Christmas Eve agreement with our union (UMFCLW) allowed us to deliver the 2008 MFCL. The eleventh-hour bailout was crafted to give you just enough MFCL to stimulate your own Christmas cheer. You - incapable of providing for your own cheer - urgently needed this bailout or your entire holiday would implode.

The stimulus was an overwhelming success. We have concluded, based on nary a single shred of evidence, that our efforts have

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #7: Christmas 2008

We apologize for the late hour of the arrival of the Morrow Family Christmas Letter (MFCL). Due to reckless irresponsibility, the MFCL found itself in need of a bailout. Fortunately, at the eleventh hour, when the MFCL was on the very brink dissolution, the U.S. Treasury Department determined that the MFCL was simply too big to fail. The imminent collapse of the MFCL posed too great a threat to the enjoyment of Christmas for too many Americans. So, the government has offered us a $7 billion “bridge loan to nowhere.” We responded enthusiastically: “YES WE CAN (take your money).”

‘Tis the season for big government bailouts!

In retrospect, the MFCL just got too big too fast. Like many, we fell victim to

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #6: Christmas 2007

Let's confront the elephant in the room. It is entirely possible that you are receiving the Morrow Family Christmas LetterTM after Christmas Day. Or, perhaps, due to uncharacteristically herculean efficiency on the part of the U.S. Postal Service or a genuine, one-of-a-kind Christmas miracle, you may be receiving yours days (or even mere hours) before the blessed day.

Either way, you may be tempted to wonder

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #5: Christmas 2006

Annually, we rack our brains for new ways to turn what many regard as a sweet holiday tradition into a crushing victory in a blood-and-guts, take-no-prisoners competitive event. But, it’s time to face reality. No, Virginia, there is no Christmas Letter of the Year Award. We have yet to receive our trophy in the mail, an honorable mention letter, an invitation to the awards gala banquet, or even a “Try Again” bottlecap. So we determined that after four failed attempts, we would retire the annual Morrow Family Christmas Letter (MFCL).

Then a close friend confided that each day since Labor Day, he has trudged to his mailbox, often through the snow and ice, in hopes

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #4: Christmas 2005

Welcome to the 2005 Morrow Family Christmas Letter – Special Edition. As a past recipient, you know just how seriously we take the Morrow Family Christmas Letter, affectionately abbreviated by our friends as the MF Christmas Letter. We prefer the MFCL.

In last year’s edition, we confessed

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #3: Christmas 2004

Greetings and a very Merry Christmas to all our dear friends and family. We are now in year three of the Morrow Christmas letter tradition and, as any movie buff will tell you, the third installment of any trilogy is rarely any good. Consider: Godfather III, Matrix Revolutions, even Return of the Jedi lacked a certain pizzazz present in its predecessors. And let’s not even delve into Superman III (Richard Pryor? And no Lois Lane? Come on).

We share this as a way of dampening expectations, thereby raising our likelihood

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #2: Christmas 2003

Merry Christmas to Our Dear Family and Friends!

Last year we took our first crack at the fashionable and en vogue “Christmas Letter.” We made the conversion for the least noble of all reasons: “everybody else was doing it.” Our blind buckling to peer pressure has now become a full-fledged Morrow Family Tradition. It’s not quite on par with reading the Christmas story out of Luke on Christmas Eve; but certainly above our tradition of dressing the dog up

Morrow Family Christmas Letter #1: Christmas 2002

Dear Friends:

We’ve always been more the Christmas card types. You know: buy the cards, write something short and sweet for each of our friends, lick the stamps, drop ‘em in the mail. That’s us. Most of you probably already know the routine, since you are veterans of the Morrow Christmas Card List. We don’t send pictures of ourselves, or our kids (in our case a runt black lab mix mutt who is named after our 40th U.S. President). And, until this year, we didn’t send “the Christmas Letter."

So, why now? Have our lives become so fascinating that we